Cult Of The Lamb Stops Being Animal Crossing Once It Stops Being Hades

thegamer.com:

I was wary of Cult of the Lamb being sold to me as Animal Crossing meets Hades. The whole ‘this great thing’ plus ‘this great thing’ does not, despite mathematical logic, often add up to ‘one super great thing’. And yet as I played Cult of the Lamb, it turned out to be super great. It was part Animal Crossing, part Hades, and while that really shouldn’t work, it landed right in the sweet spot, borrowing the exact right elements from both games. The only issue is at a certain point it stops being Hades, and then it immediately stops being Animal Crossing.

I played through Cult of the Lamb at the weekend, beating it in around 16 hours. I loved it. But I think I’m done with it. For reference, I have 250 hours on ACNH, and 65 on Hades. You might argue those are pandemic aided, and I could yet go back to CotL, but that’s a considerable difference. I don’t buy the idea that a game’s value of quality should be marked against hours spent, but it’s another example of how ‘this thing’ plus ‘this thing’ always comes with downsides, even when it lives up to expectations.

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Cult of the Lamb sees you raid four different dungeons four times each, before unlocking the final showdown. That’s the Hades part. When you’re not off fighting, you’re maintaining a village by constructing buildings, housing villagers, gathering crops, and upgrading everything in sight. That’s the Animal Crossing part. Once you win this final showdown, you can continue to play, heading back to the original dungeons with tougher enemies and higher rewards. But I can’t help wondering why I would ever bother.

At the end of Cult of the Lamb (spoilers follow, though nothing you couldn’t predict),